Re: [xdi] Article on semantic interop in IoT

["=Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@xdi.org>]

It's a very good point, Markus, that just the problem of authorizing connections—and the attendant security and privacy issues—is going to be all but intractable without a standardized solution.

On Mon, Mar 9, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Markus Sabadello <markus.sabadello@xdi.org> wrote:

Sounds like they need a Community Dictionary Service :)

And of course the "things" in the IoT need XDI Connect to authorize and connect to each other.

Markus

On 03/09/2015 06:47 PM, =Drummond Reed wrote:

My LinkedIn newsfeed this morning had an article titled Defining the Unified Data Model for the Internet of Things by James Kobielus, an IBM Big Data evangelist and a longtime SOA architect.

I was struck by these two paragraphs:

The more fragmented and heterogeneous IoT’s physical layer grows, the more critical it is that all nodes and applications share a common data model. Semantic interoperability standards will be paramount. As in any distributed IT environment, semantic interoperability in the IoT cloud will enable applications to understand the precise meaning of each piece of data that they import, acquire, retrieve, and otherwise receive from elsewhere. Without a transparent view into the semantics of externally originated content, IoT-powered applications cannot know how to validate, map, transform, correlate, and otherwise process that information without garbling its meaning.
Without standardization on a canonical semantic data model, integration professionals will find themselves fighting a lost cause when trying to make disparate IoT domains play together as a common resource. Typically, semantic interoperability requires that integration specialists define mappings to ensure that meaning is not lost or misconstrued when data is transformed among disparate schemas, glossaries, and ontologies. This can be a complex, error-prone exercise, because separate application domains often use different data syntaxes, schemas, and formats to describe semantically equivalent entities.

It seemed like a clarion call for the XDI semantic graph model. Of course the graph model itself is not the entire solution—you still have to adapt the "disparate schemas, glossaries, and ontologies" into a functioning set of XDI dictionary definitions across an IoT ecosystem. But at least you'd have a common semantic data model and protocol with which to do that.